Friday, July 02, 2010

The Legionnaires: Misses

I group these two together because, to me, they have a lot in common. They're

a) powerful female Legionnairesb) from the rebootc) with a lot of potentiald) that was never realized.

Try to come up with signature moments for either of these two. I was totally stumped. Thunder didn't get much time onstage at all as a Legionnaire. Kinetix was used much more, and some of the stories were okay, but as prominently featured as she may have been it didn't help to show off why her character worked. I know Kinetix has a lot of fans out there, and maybe one of them can set me straight on this, but I don't think anyone ever really managed to get the maximum out of Kinetix. I want to like both Kinetix and Thunder, but I don't have a lot to go on.

Kinetix had a well-known character trait: she was hungry for power. She was only ever going to use such power in the service of good, of course, but she still wanted it. It's the kind of thing that I can imagine someone thinking. "Why don't we come up with a superhero who wants power?" Perfectly reasonable idea. But just because you have such a character doesn't mean anything interesting is going on with her. And Kinetix in particular was always going through losing her powers (a kind of molecular control) and gaining them back and having them changed and going through this or that weird metamorphosis, and that didn't help either. And then Geoff Johns decided she was a wizard and killed her off in Legion of 3 Worlds.

Thunder was a member of the Marvel Family from even further into the future than the Legion. While with the Legion, she spent her spare moments tracking down fragments of the Rock of Eternity so she could put it back together. Then after the Blight attacked she decided she just wanted to go home.

I'd be surprised if we saw either character again in Legion comics. Not soon, anyway. It's a shame; they both deserve a chance for someone to get them right.